Who am I, truly?

I am not sure, to be honest. Lately, I have kept telling myself that I would like to be more myself, but what does it even mean? Who am I being myself? Honestly, I can’t even remember the last time I was completely authentic, behaving the way I truly feel like and not the way society, friends or family want me to do. Moreover, in today´s world it is not usual to be just who the person really is since when someone differs from the others, he is labelled as a weirdo. However, enough of that! It would be better if I said something about me. I will try to be brief, but not too brief to miss the most important stuff.

I was born in May 1995. I guess no one remembers much of their childhood and neither do I, but I feel I remember even less than the others. The one thing I remember is one moment I was a normal, curious and talkative little child and the next one all of the sudden I became an introvert suffering from social anxiety. I wish I knew what had happened, but I have no idea. I was attending an elementary school at the time but I wasn’t comfortable talking to people, not even mentioning strangers. Reading aloud or giving a presentation in a class full of people has been a nightmare since the time. I wasn’t able to talk to people and, even worse, I could not express myself or my emotions. I still have had these problems and it has brought loads of trouble in my life. Fortunately, now, after more than 15 years, I have been overcoming it and beginning to live a normal life. However, when I try to picture myself having a career of an artist, I can see the ability to communicate is a huge stepping stone to success. In this context, it seems to be one of the most important personal skills to have. It is about sharing my thoughts with the world outside and about selling my art and myself. That´s why a little non-speaking boy must become a strong expressive man if he wants to live his dreams. Basically, from one extreme to another.

I have also made an artwork which helps me now and shines communicative energy towards me every day. More about the painting here.

And how did I get to art? I can’t remember either. All I know is we used to have art classes in elementary school which I didn’t really enjoy. Obviously, I am not sure. However, when I was about 15 I often drew into my exercise books during all the important classes. At home, I frequently drew pictures of planes and cars. I enjoyed it a little bit more (than the classes itself. But every time I messed something up, I didn’t draw a line for a few months or even a year. At high school, I was able to sketch realistic images of cars and I even got my first commission work – to paint a challenger – and I got 500 CZK for it. Nice. Around that time, I got a case with art supplies for Christmas including also acrylic paint and a few pieces of canvas and I was just hooked. It was a time of experiments but abstraction already drew my attention. Later I managed to create something beautiful (some beautiful artwork) and, although it didn’t make much sense, it made me very happy. I got myself better canvas and paint and I learned how to stretch the canvas on a frame and gained loads of experience. In 2018 I bough my first oil paint and fell in love with it.

My artwork is a little bit strange. I always try to do things differently and even though realistic painting may seem tough – and sometimes it really is – I find it more difficult to make up something new and out of the ordinary. Therefore I often find myself delicately balancing on the edge between abstraction and reality. It seems to me that it is like if I were disrupting what is real and concrete with pieces of me, pieces of my soul. My desire has always been to create something beautiful, something meaningful, with just the right shapes and just the right colours to please the eyes of those looking at my work. It seems to me like I have something which could be called a sense of beauty, but I don’t know. I am not sure… Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. I don’t know what is true about me. Yet. But what I already know is I don’t want to be someone I am not. Not anymore. I want to be who I really am.